Oilcan swooped around the extra barrels and dropped down to land in front of the loading dock where Tinker sat.
“Hey!” Oilcan called as he killed his hoverbike’s engine. “Wow! Look at you.”
“Hey yourself!” Tinker tugged down her skirt, just in case she was flashing panty. Gods, she hated dresses. “Thanks for coming.”
“Glad to help.” He leaned against the chest high dock. Wood sprites was what Tooloo had called them as kids — small, nut brown from head to bare toes, and fey in the way people used to think elves would look. Beneath his easy smile and summer stain of walnut, though, he seemed drawn.
“You okay?” She nudged him in the ribs with her toe.
“Me?” He scoffed. “I’m not the one being attacked by monsters every other day.”
“Bleah.” She poked him again to cover the guilty feeling of making him so worried about her. “It’s like — what — nearly noon? And there’s not a monster in sight.”
“I’m glad you called.” He pulled out a folded newspaper. “Otherwise I might have been worried. Did you see this?”
“This” was a full front-page story screaming “Princess Mauled.” She hadn’t seen a photographer yesterday when Windwolf carried her through the coach yard but apparently one had seen her. She flopped back onto the cement. “Oh, son of a turd.”
Oilcan nudged against her foot, as if seeking the closeness they had just moments before. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have shown it to you.”
“You didn’t take the picture.” Lying down felt too good, like she could easily drift to sleep. She sat back up and held out her hand for the paper. “Let me see how bad it really is.”
She looked small, helpless and battered in Windwolf’s arms, covered with an alarming amount of blood. The picture caption was “Viceroy Windwolf carries Vicereine Tinker to safety after she and her bodyguards were attacked by a large wild animal.”
“What the hell is a vicereine?” she asked.
“Wife of the viceroy.”
“Oh.” There, she was married, the newspaper said so. “It still sounds weird.”
“Vicereine?”
“All of it. Vicereine. Princess. Wife. Married. It seems unreal for some reason.”
She scanned the story. It was odd that while it was she and the five elf warriors in the valley, all the information came from human sources. It listed her age and previous address, but only gave Stormsong’s English name, not her full elfin one of Linapavuata-watarou-bo-taeli which meant Singing Storm Wind. And the sekasha were labeled “royal bodyguards.” Was it because the reporter didn’t speak Elvish, or was it because the elves didn’t like to talk about themselves? She learned nothing except the news had a very human slant. It was odd that she hadn’t noticed before.
“Even after all this time, you don’t feel married?” Oilcan asked.
She made a rude noise and nudged him again in the ribs with her toe. “No. Not really. It doesn’t help that Tooloo is spreading rumors that I’m not.”
“She is? Why?”
“Who knows why that crazy half-elf does anything?” Tinker wasn’t sure which was worse: that Tooloo was considered an expert on elfin culture, or that the people Tinker cared about most all shopped at Tooloo’s general store. Her lies would spread out from McKees Rocks like a virus with an authenticity that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette couldn’t touch.
“Hell,” she continued. “It was like three days before I even figured out that I was married — I don’t even remember what I said when he proposed.”
“Does he treat you well?” Oilcan asked. “Doesn’t yell at you? Call you names? Try to make you feel stupid?”
She made the kick a little harder. “He’s good to me. He treats me like a princess.”
“Ow!” He danced away, laughing. “Okay, okay. I just don’t want to see you hurt.” He sobered, and added quietly. “My dad always waited until we were home alone.”
His father had beaten his mother to death in a drunken rage. When Oilcan came to live with them, he was black and blue from head to knees, and flinched at a raised hand.
“Windwolf isn’t like your dad.” She tried not to be angry at the comparison; Oilcan was only worried about her. “If nothing else, he’s a hell of lot older than your dad.”
“This is a good thing?”
Tinker clicked her tongue in an elfin shrug without thinking and then realized what she’d done. “The elves have been so much more patient than I could ever imagine being. Windwolf has moved the whole household to Pittsburgh to make me happy, because to them, living here for a couple decades is nothing.”
“Good.”
“Now, are you going to help me with this tree?” She asked.
“I’ll think about it.” He grinned impishly.
Chapter 8: Calling The Wind
She had to learn not to be surprised when Windwolf popped up at odd times.
She was stretched out on the back room’s floor, making a copy of her grandfather’s spell. Her attempts with a camera failed, the magical interference corrupting the digital image. After what it had done to the camera, she decided against bringing in her datapad to scan it. Instead she had Reinhold’s find a roll of brown packaging paper. She covered the floor with paper, and now was making a tracing by simply rubbing crayons lightly across the paper, pressing harder when she felt the depression of the spell tracings. Working with the damaged spell made her nervous, and her dress was driving her nuts, so she stripped down to underwear and socks and Oilcan’s t-shirt.
She’d worn the black crayon out, so she upended the box, spilling the rest of the crayons out onto the floor beside her. The array of colors splayed out on the floor shoved all other thoughts from her mind. She used to make magic pencils by mixing metal filings into melted crayons, poured into molds and then wrapped with construction paper. The only bulk supply of crayons were the packs of sixty-four different shades, which she would separate into the eight basic colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black and white. It got so she could look at a spray of crayons and see those eight — but she was seeing twelve now.
Since becoming an elf, she knew she saw the world slightly differently. Things she thought were beautiful had been suddenly nearly garish or clashed weirdly. This was the first time that she had proof that Windwolf had somehow changed her basic vision.
“There you are,” Windwolf’s voice came from above her.
She glanced up to find him standing beside her. “What are you doing here?”
“I was told that you were here — drawing pictures — mostly naked.”
“Pfft.” She focused back on the paper, not sure how she felt about knowing that her vision been changed. In a way, it was like getting glasses — right? “I only took my boots, bra, and dress off.”
“I see.”
She glanced over her shoulder at him and blushed at how he was looking at her. “Hey!”
He grinned and settled cross-legged besides her, resting his hand on the small of her back. “This is an odd beast.”
It took her a moment to realize he meant the damaged spell, not her.
“Do you recognize it?”
“In a manner of speaking. It is not a whole spell.” He studied the circuits. “This is only an outer shell — one that control effects put out by another spell.”
She had been focusing on the various subsections and hadn’t realized that they didn’t form a complete spell. Her knowledge of magic came solely from experimentation and her family’s codex, which itself seemed to be an eclectic collection of spells.